Life on the Bleeding Edge ... (long)

My first Linux box, a Shuttle SB75G2 is now two and a half years old. When I
was choosing it, I was still under the impression that Linux's hardware
support was a hit-or-miss affair, so I deliberately stayed conservative: I
went for Intel rather than AMD, 32-bit rather than 64-bit. Though I did go
for a SATA drive.

After managing Linux systems for other people for a couple of years prior to
that, this was going to be my own learning box. And it has served that
purpose well.

So when I was going for a successor to that box a couple of months ago, I
decided to be a little bit adventurous (at least for me): AMD rather than
Intel, 64-bit rather than 32-bit, and PCI-Express rather than PCI/AGP. I
went for another Shuttle--an SN25P--because I think they look good and
don't take up much space, while still offering a few options for expansion.

And this time I decided to put it together myself, rather than having the
shop do it for me. Suffice it to say I got there in the end.

I also decided to be a bit more adventurous on the software side, as well.
Instead of the SuSE system on the older Shuttle (most of my clients also
run SuSE, and it's the distro I'm most familiar with), I decided, just for
the sheer hell of it, to install Gentoo.

The contrast between the two approaches couldn't be greater. Where SuSE
offers a slick, GUI-based installer where you just choose the features you
want and then watch while it does its thing, a Gentoo setup is very
much hands-on. Boot up the install CD, and that leaves you staring at a
shell prompt. At this point, you have to refer to the "Gentoo Handbook" to
discover what to do: format and partition your hard drive as necessary,
copy across an initial directory structure, update your Portage tree,
configure, build and install a kernel, do some other basic configuration
bits and pieces, and pretty soon you can reboot into your new system.

Things are still pretty bare at this point, but you can use the "emerge"
command to install anything else that you might need. Further following the
life-on-the-bleeding-edge policy, I decided to use Enlightenment as my
window manager. By default I got E16, the current stable release, which
looked a bit boring. But I soon found how to "unmask" (enable for
installation) the still-in-development E17 version. Yes, quite a few things
don't work. But man, is it pretty.

Pretty soon, I found myself hankering after a decent terminal emulator. I
couldn't figure out how to do simple copy/paste in eterm or xterm, so I
went back to good old Konsole, just like on my KDE-based SuSE system. For a
Web browser I was able to install Firefox, which works just fine.

Then I tried installing KNode, which is what I'm mainly using right now for
accessing USENET. That _sort of_ works: I can read and post articles OK
(mostly), though it complains at every startup of missing MIME types, and
the little graphics it substitutes for smileys don't show properly. And
when I try to go into the configuration dialogs, they come up empty.

So I figured I was missing important core parts of KDE that apps like KNode
need to work. Strange: I thought the point of packaging systems like
Portage was that they would automatically resolve dependencies like this
when I ask for something to be installed. After all, that's how it works on
SuSE.

After a bit more stuffing around (and reading various bits of
documentation), I discover that, under Gentoo, KDE comes packaged in two
different ways: as one set of fewer, larger "monolithic" packages, and as
another set of more and smaller components. Aha! That explains why so many
parts of KDE were "blocked" by other parts when I tried to install them. I
chose the "monolithic" package set, and left it chugging away for several
hours as it downloaded and installed all the bits.

(Yes, all this install-everything-from-source business can take quite a
while. That's Gentoo for you.)

When I first put Gentoo on, the current version was 2006.0. Then 2006.1 was
released a few weeks ago. Upgrading my system was, in one way, trivially
simple, yet in another way, a long-drawn-out affair: all I had to do was
change one symlink (/etc/make.profile) to point to an updated "profile"
which had already been copied to my hard drive during a previous Portage
update. And then the next time I tried to install something, it discovered
that large parts of my system were now out-of-date, and so it spent the
next day downloading and installing about 100 different package updates.

At the end of it, KNode _still_ didn't work properly. After a bit of hunting
around on the Web, I found some mention of having to run kbuildsycoca to
rebuild some system database. Tried that, and _it_ complained about missing
MIME types too! And it didn't help.

So I'm missing something else in my KDE installation, that I haven't been
able to figure out yet. (And whatever it is, Konsole obviously doesn't need
it.) It's not a requirement that I switch to kwin as my window manager, is
it? Or maybe I have to start a DCOP process or something.

So anyway, I'm wondering whether to persevere with this, or switch to trying
some other distro. When I formatted the drives on both Shuttles, I set
aside four partitions each for different OS installs, so I could switch
between alternative distros and keep the same user files in my /home
directories. I've yet to do much with any Debian-based system. Maybe time
to give Ubuntu/Kubuntu a try?

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Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> So anyway, I'm wondering whether to persevere with this, or switch to
> trying some other distro. When I formatted the drives on both Shuttles, I
> set aside four partitions each for different OS installs, so I could
> switch between alternative distros and keep the same user files in my
> /home directories. I've yet to do much with any Debian-based system. Maybe
> time to give Ubuntu/Kubuntu a try?

I have never understood why people use gentoo (Cue Allistar with a thousand
good and valid reasons to use it)
I built LFS a couple of times, and that put me off the whole compiling
addiction
(I have a 1.7 celeron that at the time had 256MB of DDR, and a full
compilation, from scratch took 10 hours)

If you are the adventurous type, why not dual boot Linices?
Depending on your partition plan its a fairly trivial process (hell I
figured it out!)
Theres a SFD stand planned for outside whitcoulls (Centreplace) tomorrow
9am - 3pm Im fairly sure there will be Ubuntu cd's floating about
(My only gripe is they havent mentioned if theres sausages or not!!!)

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Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
> Pretty soon, I found myself hankering after a decent terminal
> emulator. I couldn't figure out how to do simple copy/paste in eterm
> or xterm....
>
You are joking, aren't you?

Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> My first Linux box, a Shuttle SB75G2 is now two and a half years old. When I
> was choosing it, I was still under the impression that Linux's hardware
> support was a hit-or-miss affair, so I deliberately stayed conservative: I
> went for Intel rather than AMD, 32-bit rather than 64-bit. Though I did go
> for a SATA drive.
>
8><
> So anyway, I'm wondering whether to persevere with this, or switch to trying
> some other distro. When I formatted the drives on both Shuttles, I set
> aside four partitions each for different OS installs, so I could switch
> between alternative distros and keep the same user files in my /home
> directories. I've yet to do much with any Debian-based system. Maybe time
> to give Ubuntu/Kubuntu a try?

I share your experiences!

I am running gentoo too (oh s**t rhyming) I got the hankering to try it
from using Slackware my problem was that Slackware was finding uptodate
packages and then having to go in balls out with source and compiling
then to find out I had broken the system!

Gentoo seems more friendly than slack! the hand book says its a fast
moving target. My biggest hurdle was the kernel source 2.6.17 was quite
broken for me so I had to down load the official kernel from
kernel.org and manually install the thing manually configure and make it
all luckily have had many a go with slackware. the next trick was
gettin the nvidia tnt card to use the nvidia drivers (had to use the
legacy drivers) well that is all up and running now, mostly happy I have
found it more snappy on the older hardware where something like redhat
and mandrake was quite slow in comparison.

The real Kicker is the wife likes it we can have two Xsessions open at
the same time on different terminals! Gentoo only ended up being used
full time when Windows did the big suck the kumera nothing a full
reinstall wont fix but not bad enough to go through all of that! I was
experimenting with Gentoo at the time unhappy with Slack and running out
of disk space!

I remember the words in a book about installing Linux after you have
installed it format and start again! you will learn more that way!

Anony Mouse wrote:
> Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> Maybe time
>> to give Ubuntu/Kubuntu a try?
> Maybe you should try Debian first. (Sarge)
> Ubuntu is only a layer on top of Debian.

Not really a layer, unless you mean artwork
Its current stable version is a fork of Debian based on the packages
from Debian unstable, so its more up to date. Its like running Debians
next release. When I ran Debian unstable the updates were massive, with
Ubuntu Dapper they are just security and maintenance.
Changes made in Ubuntu are contributed back into Debian.

Shane wrote:
> Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> So anyway, I'm wondering whether to persevere with this, or switch to
>> trying some other distro. When I formatted the drives on both Shuttles, I
>> set aside four partitions each for different OS installs, so I could
>> switch between alternative distros and keep the same user files in my
>> /home directories. I've yet to do much with any Debian-based system.
>> Maybe time to give Ubuntu/Kubuntu a try?
>
>
> I have never understood why people use gentoo (Cue Allistar with a
> thousand good and valid reasons to use it)

Not a thousand, but here they are: I like the fact that I can tweak the
installation of packages for my exact architecture. The package dependency
checking is second to none, IMO. I never have issues that cannot be easily
resolved. I like that fact that I have learned 100 times more about Linux
using Gentoo than I would have had I stuck with Mandrake. As a software
developer that's important - I now am a lot more familiar with the
fundamentals than I was before.
> I built LFS a couple of times, and that put me off the whole compiling
> addiction
> (I have a 1.7 celeron that at the time had 256MB of DDR, and a full
> compilation, from scratch took 10 hours)
>
> If you are the adventurous type, why not dual boot Linices?
> Depending on your partition plan its a fairly trivial process (hell I
> figured it out!)
> Theres a SFD stand planned for outside whitcoulls (Centreplace) tomorrow
> 9am - 3pm Im fairly sure there will be Ubuntu cd's floating about
> (My only gripe is they havent mentioned if theres sausages or not!!!)

I'd stick with Gentoo, but use KDE instead. The issue is with your choice of
window manager, not with your choice of distribution. Once you get the
KNode issue sorted (using the non monolithic KDE ebuilds is a good idea if
you want control over what gets installed - all of KDE is BIG - there's a
lot of guff that you most likely won't use) you'll find Gentoo a breeze.

When you installed KNode it should have wanted to install a lot of other KDE
packages too - did it?

Which is what I've been trying to do, but ...
> When you installed KNode it should have wanted to install a lot of other
> KDE packages too - did it?

I chose the "monolithic" packages, which seemed to build OK. However, I have
this problem that my libexpat keeps getting upgraded to version 2.0 whereas
KNode seems to want a 1.x version. I can re-emerge KNode, and it builds and
installs, but then it won't run because it wants libexpat.so.0, whereas my
system has libexpat.so.1. I can't understand how it can build against a
version of the library that isn't on my system.

In message <450afb14$>, Robert Cooze wrote:
> I remember the words in a book about installing Linux after you have
> installed it format and start again! you will learn more that way!

Well, I wouldn't go that far.

I have done a whole bunch of Linux installs by now--probably got a total of
a couple of dozen machines--servers and desktops--running for different
clients. I like sniffing around config files and startup scripts and stuff
to figure out how things work. I figure that GUI tools tend to be
distro-specific, whereas there's a lot more commonality in the structure
and function of the underlying config files and scripts.

Nowadays I have users who are wanting to do more and more things themselves,
without calling on me all the time. Naturally they prefer to do things
through the GUI. So I have to become more familiar with that way of doing
things, just so I can explain it to them. And back it up with a few choice
command-line snippets, for situations that the GUI can't handle on its own.

In message <>, Allistar wrote:
> I like the fact that [with Gentoo] I can tweak the installation of
> packages for my exact architecture.

Hmm, yeah. I wonder if this is where I could be going wrong--having some
build option misconfigured.
> The package dependency checking is second to none, IMO.

Fine for adding things, but I wonder about removing things. The Handbook
warns you that the emerge command doesn't do any checking that something
you're removing is required by something else--it's up to you to explicitly
remove the depending package first. Whereas RPM-based systems simply won't
let you remove something that's still needed by something else.
> I like that fact that I have learned 100 times more about Linux
> using Gentoo than I would have had I stuck with Mandrake.

When I bought my first Shuttle over two years ago, it came with a copy of
Mandrake 9.1 "Discovery Edition" in the box. "Discovery" meant that it was
missing the third CD with GCC and developer tools and stuff. So my first
adventure was finding the Mandrake repositories online, and setting my
urpmi configuration to pull down the missing tools from them. I also
noticed some configuration options to do with user-proficiency
level--"beginnner" versus "advanced", that kind of thing--but I never got
very far with figuring out how to tweak that, because after about a couple
of months I took home a copy of SuSE 9.1 that I had been setting up for a
client and installed that.

I kept the option to dual-boot, but I very quickly stopped using it. SuSE
was a much more complete environment, with a good range of packages for
both desktop and server use, so I stuck with that for all of my installs
for clients from then on. I upgraded my Shuttle to SuSE 10.0 when that came
out, and after I'd been running it successfully myself for a couple of
months, I started giving that version to clients.

On Sat, 16 Sep 2006 16:28:27 +1200, Lawrence D'Oliveiro
<_zealand> exclaimed:
>In message <450afb14$>, Robert Cooze wrote:
>
>> I remember the words in a book about installing Linux after you have
>> installed it format and start again! you will learn more that way!
>
>Well, I wouldn't go that far.
>
>I have done a whole bunch of Linux installs by now--probably got a total of
>a couple of dozen machines--servers and desktops--running for different
>clients. I like sniffing around config files and startup scripts and stuff
>to figure out how things work. I figure that GUI tools tend to be
>distro-specific, whereas there's a lot more commonality in the structure
>and function of the underlying config files and scripts.
>
>Nowadays I have users who are wanting to do more and more things themselves,
>without calling on me all the time. Naturally they prefer to do things
>through the GUI. So I have to become more familiar with that way of doing
>things, just so I can explain it to them. And back it up with a few choice
>command-line snippets, for situations that the GUI can't handle on its own.

Ok, I've resisted up until now, but I really would like to make a
genuine comment here. And no, this is not taking a cheap shot, but
more to highlight the point I've made several times in the past, to
the "poo poo" of the Linux fraternity.

Firstly, I'm not an MS fanboy. I work with both Windows and Linux
regularly, and honestly believe in the best tool for the job, which is
why I use Windows on the desktop, file server, groupware server, etc,
and Linux at the firewall, web server, and sometimes for things like
DNS in a high demand environment.

However, here's my point. I'm not saying that Linux on the desktop is
right for everyone, but over the last few posts you've made the
following points regarding your current favourite flavour of Linux.
This is against a background of the zealots on the group trying to say
that it is a far better option for the mass market than other, more
mature, operating systems (such as Windows).

Just to reiterate a few of your comments:

1. Installation is via a command-line, and you must manually partition
the drive, copy things, build and compile a kernel, etc.
2. The GUI you ended up with was bare and lacked functionality. You
could change to a development version that was very broken but looked
"pretty".
3. Your terminal application did not seem to support copy/paste (this
seems to be common amongst Linux apps - they either don't support it,
each use different shortcuts, or do not support it between
applications).
4. The Usenet reader is broken in a number of ways, from random error
messages through to blank dialogs and images not showing, which, to
date, and despite upgrades etc, you've not been able to fix.
5. It took several hours to download and install a more comprehensive
window manager, which you were, for the most part, not using (just
needed shared libraries).
6. It took an entire day (and god knows how much bandwidth) updating a
minor version of the OS (the equivalent of a "Service Pack"). I assume
the system was either unavailable or available with a reduced response
during this time?
7. In the Linux world, GUI tools tend to be distribution-specific
rather than standardised.
8. Users have said that they don't want to keep having to pay and pay
to have you come and do basic tasks on their systems, and prefer a GUI
that allows them to do it.
9. You still have to provide command-line snippets, as the GUIs in
Linux are not capable of handling non-arbitrary tasks.
10. Not to mention other users who have chimed in with gems like
updating applications breaking the system, etc.

And all this being labelled "bleeding edge".

Do you really, in all honesty, think this is a superior solution than
Windows for the momma and poppa users out there?

And to reiterate, I don't want this to turn into a flame war. Just
honest and frank discussion.

T'was the Fri, 15 Sep 2006 22:00:40 +1200 when I remembered Lawrence
D'Oliveiro <_zealand> saying something like
this:
>At the end of it, KNode _still_ didn't work properly. After a bit of hunting
>around on the Web, I found some mention of having to run kbuildsycoca to
>rebuild some system database. Tried that, and _it_ complained about missing
>MIME types too! And it didn't help.

I once installed Agent after a reboot. I doubled clicked on the
application in the folder, and it ran. I like how it stores all its
configuration files in an ini file, Agent runs forever!

Life on the bleeding edge doesn't sound fun from a main desktop point
of view, but fun for inside a virtual machine.
--
Cheers,

In message <>, Fred Dagg wrote:
> However, here's my point. I'm not saying that Linux on the desktop is
> right for everyone, but over the last few posts you've made the
> following points regarding your current favourite flavour of Linux.
> This is against a background of the zealots on the group trying to say
> that it is a far better option for the mass market than other, more
> mature, operating systems (such as Windows).

Sooner or later it had to happen ... somebody would misunderstand.
> Do you really, in all honesty, think this is a superior solution than
> Windows for the momma and poppa users out there?

Where in this thread did I say that Gentoo was 1) my favourite flavour of
Linux, or 2) a "superior solution ... for the momma and poppa users out
there"?

Which part of the concept of "Bleeding Edge" are you having trouble with?

[snip]
> And all this being labelled "bleeding edge".
>
> Do you really, in all honesty, think this is a superior solution than
> Windows for the momma and poppa users out there?

Heck, where this enter the thread? The OP was telling us of his
experiences with Gentoo and SUSE. MS was not metioned
>
> And to reiterate, I don't want this to turn into a flame war. Just
> honest and frank discussion.

On Fri, 15 Sep 2006 22:37:41 +1200, Shane wrote:
> I have never understood why people use gentoo (Cue Allistar with a thousand
> good and valid reasons to use it)

Because they get enjoyment/satisfaction from it. Why do people go skiing
or play golf or follow rugby etc?
> I built LFS a couple of times, and that put me off the whole compiling
> addiction
> (I have a 1.7 celeron that at the time had 256MB of DDR, and a full
> compilation, from scratch took 10 hours)

I paradox here, is that a slow(er) machine goes faster Gentoo, as building
from the source allows customisation. However, compiling goes so much
better (faster) with plain raw cpu power.

Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> In message <>, Fred Dagg wrote:
>
>
>>However, here's my point. I'm not saying that Linux on the desktop is
>>right for everyone, but over the last few posts you've made the
>>following points regarding your current favourite flavour of Linux.
>>This is against a background of the zealots on the group trying to say
>>that it is a far better option for the mass market than other, more
>>mature, operating systems (such as Windows).
>
>
> Sooner or later it had to happen ... somebody would misunderstand.
>
>
>>Do you really, in all honesty, think this is a superior solution than
>>Windows for the momma and poppa users out there?
>
>
> Where in this thread did I say that Gentoo was 1) my favourite flavour of
> Linux, or 2) a "superior solution ... for the momma and poppa users out
> there"?
>
> Which part of the concept of "Bleeding Edge" are you having trouble with?

Must say I wondered why you were doing that Gentoo thing - killing time? To see
if you could? Because the things Fred correctly (except that he took them to be
common to all Linux distros) picked out of your post as being disadvantageous to
the user would have driven me up the wall, but then I'm not a geek, I'm a
tool-user and all I ask is for the computer-machine to be a useful tool so I can
do the things I want to do, and those things are challenge enough for me!

So I guess I'll never understand the people who really enjoy the challenge of
putting the machine together, hard- and software, finding out what works and
what doesn't, or not very well, and figuring our how to make it work right. I'm
sure I benefit from people like you, because without you and your kind Linux
wouldn't be forever improving - I just don't "get" making life for yourselves
that difficult in the meantime!

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